An area where technological advancement is proceeding rapidly is in the equipment used for medical diagnosis and treatment. The achievements in this area have yielded tools that allow treating physicians, scientists, researchers, etc. to be more aware of various factors that may be indicative of illness in organic bodies (e.g., human beings, animals, etc.). Traditionally medical equipment was designed to work using an outside-in approach. This was necessary because the scale of the technology involved in medical diagnosis and treatment equipment was considerably larger than the space available inside the organic body being treated. However, developments in electronics have allowed medical devices to shrink substantially. Large-scale implanted devices such as pacemakers and heart-assist pumps may help to maintain a normal heartbeat. Examples of smaller devices may include pill-like cameras. These devices may be implanted or swallowed to record, and even wirelessly transmit, data regarding various operations inside an organic body.
However, as medical diagnostic and treatment devices shrink even smaller (e.g., to scales so small that devices may exist freely within the bloodstream of an organic body), problems are often encountered. Devices on the scale of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) may have great potential in that certain monitoring or treatment operations may be performed continuously from within an organic body without the procedure being overly invasive or an impediment to a subject. However, implementing even rudimentary monitoring and transmission functionality on devices with so little real estate is problematic at best. Existing battery technologies have limited applicability in this area. For example, current lithium ion battery technology would render any such device too large to navigate the bloodstream safely, and charged capacitor batteries, while substantially smaller, cannot hold enough charge to be viable as a long term energy source.
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications and variations thereof will be apparent to those skilled in the art.